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Catherine Rey, who currently lives in Western Australia, has
published six novels in her native France. The Spruiker's
Tale is the first of these works to be translated into
English. If it is anything to go by, we can only hope that the
remaining five will also be published in this country, since Rey is
a flamboyant talent indeed.

The Spruiker's Tale is a wild fantasy spiked with a
pitch-black sense of humour. Outrageous, hysterical and brutal, it
manages to be hilarious and appalling all at once. In Andrew
Reimer's fine translation, the mock grandeur of the book's Old
Testament rhetoric becomes a sweeping ode to human vice and folly.
The narrative lurches, with delirious energy, from acts of gruesome
violence and cruelty to moments of high comedy and back again.
Satire doesn't come much more savage or pitiless.

The novel's one-eyed narrator, Jones, who oversees but takes no
part in the action, leads the reader through the bleak history of
the Nangalingams, a family of former circus performers who have
washed up in the dismal outback town of Tompton. Stranded in their
squalid shack, with their father Tarcisius dying on the veranda
(much to his wife's disgust, he lingers for 30 years), the
Nangalingams have little better to do than turn on each other,
compounding each other's misery and creating a perfect circle of
malice in which they curse themselves as they curse the world.

The family is dominated by their matriarch, Magnolita Rosaria, a
once famous acrobat who now bears a grudge against the universe for
the loss of her career and all the glory and attention that went
along with it. She is an unforgettably grotesque creation.
Possessed of a rebarbative personality and a soul that is, as Jones
puts it, "a bog in which the Devil himself could drown", her
corrosive misanthropy sets the tone for the whole novel and poisons
the lives of her immediate family.

Her oldest son, Abraham, is an uncontrollable brute. The second
son, Sutter, a one-armed seminary dropout who is inordinately proud
of the fact he has read exactly 475 books, becomes a self-styled
hellfire preacher. The third child, Todd, seemingly the most
compliant of Magnolita Rosaria's children, asserts his independence
from his mother's stifling influence just long enough to father a
child - again, much to Magnolita Rosaria's disgust. (Needless to
say, she turns out to be a shocker of a mother-in-law, too.) While
the youngest member of the family, Todd's wilful daughter, Trinity,
inherits her grandmother's acrobatic ability and so earns Magnolita
Rosaria's undying hatred.

Around this cast of odd characters, Rey has built a slightly
shaggy, generically playful, episodic novel whose grim hilarity is
underpinned by what can only be described as a religious vision of
an irredeemably corrupt universe - one that is, if not godless,
then certainly godforsaken. The tone is frequently comical, but the
novel is unforgiving on this count. Early in the book, Sutter takes
it upon himself to stand on a barrel in the centre of town and howl
at the people of Tompton that God has abandoned them. The townsfolk
are unimpressed and react accordingly, but the novel more or less
bears out Sutter's claim that the blasted landscape of The
Spruiker's Tale is "accursed". There is no redemption to be
found here.

The Spruiker's Tale begins with the well-known biblical
verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes, which state that there is
nothing new under the sun, but it is a different phrase from
Ecclesiastes that resonates throughout Rey's novel: all is vanity.
Jones, who claims to be a former preacher, styles his narrative as
a cautionary tale. He tells us that "pity will never find a place
in the heart of the conceited" as he shows us the many ways in
which his characters are fatally conceited. It is a dark
vision.

Magnolita Rosaria claims "there's nothing good to be said for
human beings". Festering in her own resentment, she would say that
- but the novel also conveys a troubling sense that she may be
right. Even our positive attributes might spring from corrupt
motives. "Tell me," Jones asks, "is there any kind of human love
that's not self-love?"

Effective satire often has this kind of misanthropic edge, but
the integrity of The Spruiker's Tale as a grim fantasy is
sustained by the aplomb of Rey's narrative and its untamed comic
energy. Just to be absolutely clear, The Spruiker's Tale,
though dark and violent, is very funny. After all, as Jones
explains, "life is a wicked farce". It certainly is.